The Internet is no stranger to niche social networking. The Yo app, which simply lets you send the message "yo" to your contacts, became an Internet sensation in a matter of days. So it may come as no surprise that there are now plans for a social network that uses only emoji.

And, according to its founders, it's real. Or at least real enough to be worth a laugh.

Emoj.li is the brainchild of Matt Gray and Tom Scott, cast members of the British version of Technical Difficulties, a podcast and web show looking at the humorous side of technology. (Gray and Scott specified that the project was independent from Technical Difficulties.)

The two were inspired by the success of the Yo app and the Unicode Consortium's recent addition of 250 emoji, and they decided to pioneer their own comical take on social media.

"[We] had the idea at about the same time — we weren't sold on it until we realized that usernames should be emoji, too. At that point, we burst out laughing and realized we had to build it," Gray told Mashable.

Emoj.li has not officially launched, but it is currently accepting username reservations. The founders said 17,000 people had requested usernames (and yes, all usernames have to be in emoji). The site sends registration confirmation emails just like any other social network.

"We're starting out with something roughly equivalent to an instant messenger ... but with messages limited to emoji. Beyond that, well, we'll see what people want," Gray said.

The creators posted a humorous explanatory video on Emoj.li, which you can watch below:

Some have expressed doubt about the website's authenticity, but its founders insist it's legitimate.

"We're probably going to regret it, but it's real," Gray said. "We wouldn't have bothered making the backend, and spending about a day trying to figure out a regular expression that checked if a string was all emoji, if it wasn't [real]."